Title: The Coffee Can Millionaire (#QualityTuesday) Show: Compounding Quality (Substack, paid post — compoundingquality.net) Guest: Pieter Slegers / Team Compounding Quality (author; byline "Compounding Quality") Date: 2026-05-05 URL: https://www.compoundingquality.net/p/the-coffee-can-millionaire Length: written post — no timestamps Note: Paid-subscriber post captured via Stephen's logged-in session. Body text verbatim; UI chrome removed. A short #QualityTuesday issue — "five things about the stock market in less than 5 minutes" — with one stock pitch (Fair Isaac) at the end. Images noted inline as [Image — ...].
It's #QualityTuesday!
In this series, I'll teach you 5 things about the stock market in less than 5 minutes.
1. The Coffee Can Millionaire
Back in 1984, a man named Bob Kirby told a story about a widow.
She inherited her husband's stock portfolio.
She took the paper stock certificates and put them in a coffee can. Then she forgot about them for decades.
When she finally looked inside, she was surprised:
One company had gone bankrupt
Two others had no returns
And the last one? A hundred-bagger stock
Her husband had put $5,000 into a small company.
That stock grew to $800,000. That's a 160x (!) returns.
The moral of the story?
Buy and forget the stocks you have absolute conviction in.
2. The Richest Man in Babylon
The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason is a timeless classic on building wealth.
It teaches three core lessons:
Pay yourself first
Control your expenses
Make your money work for you
I created a full book summary. You can read it here: Summary: The Richest Man in Babylon
3. Focus on what you can control
I sat next to a retired pilot on a flight last month.
He said:
"The most dangerous thing in aviation isn't the storm. It's the pilot who thinks he can outfly it."
It made me think...
As investors we do not have any control over the markets.
We are humble enough to know that we may not outperform the markets every single year, but one thing is for sure..
We own some amazing companies that have great potential.
In the long-run we only need to be right about a few exceptional businesses and have the patience to let them work for us.
Just listen to Francois Rochon:
[Image — Francois Rochon quote / clip]
4. Interview Ardal Loh-Gronager
Do you know Ardal Loh-Gronager?
He wrote the excellent book The Perceptive Investor.
In the past, we interviewed Ardal Loh-Gronager. You can read it here.
[Image — Ardal Loh-Gronager]
5. Stock Pitch: Fair Isaac ($FICO)
How does the company make money?
FICO has a monopoly in credit scores in the United States. They license their proprietary scoring algorithm to major credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion)
FICO provides software to banks that helps them make and automate decisions.
This means every time you apply for a credit card, a car loan, or a mortgage, FICO gets paid a fee to provide your credit score.
You can see it as a toll bridge on lending.
FICO has a very strong moat based on network effects and regulatory barriers.
90% of top U.S. lenders use FICO
The system is hard-coded into the global financial infrastructure
ROIC remains exceptionally high (often above 50%)
The current selloff could provide opportunities:
[Image — FICO valuation / drawdown. Source: Fiscal.ai]
Everything in life compounds Team Compounding Quality
Book
Order your copy of The Art of Quality Investing here
Used sources
Interactive Brokers: Portfolio data and executing all transactions
Fiscal.ai: Financial data
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